I'm a Research Software Engineer with a PhD working in Harvard/MIT area for > 5 years. I skipped doing a postdoc and have been part several high-profile academic projects in genomics. Overall I've loved the experience and can be a great move for certain people.

A major pain point in RSE is building and sustaining larger software teams around a a single, focused long-term project with ~6-8 RSEs working together. Even the most well-funded and successful academic labs have a limit to what how much RSE effort they can support.

We need new funding models where engineering-focused leaders can muster sufficient resources (autonomously) to build great software teams that maintain high quality software in the long run. Focused Research Organizations (FROs) seem like an interesting new idea (https://www.dayoneproject.org/ideas/focused-research-organiz...).